‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Episode 3 Recap: “Now You See It”

1908’s the time, Francis Shaw’s the name, nine-minute cold opens the game here in IT: Welcome To Derry Episode 3. The young version of our 1962 Air Force general gets pressured into touring “a grotesquerie of horrors beyond your imaginings,” the freakshow at a dusty little circus in Derry. He sees twins conjoined by their guts, director Andy Muschietti cameoing as a musician, and a one-eyed “skeleton man” leering out of the dark. What he doesn’t notice is the little clown eyeing him outside.

Frank and his dad have some car trouble on the road, thanks to the clown stealing a part, which leads the boy to meet a trio of indigenous kids selling water. Short a couple cents, Frank trades his new slingshot to a girl we’ll learn is none other than Rose, whom we briefly met last week as an adult at the secondhand shop bearing her name. The kids form a friendship, and some scampering out in nature leads Frank into a patch of woods where the skeleton man leers out from behind a tree. Suddenly It’s morphing into an animalistic monstrosity and chasing Frank, those many-rowed teeth chomping away. Rose appears with a perfectly aimed slingshot assault and the thing’s blood floats into the air in a way we’ve seen before. It turns out the monster can’t leave the forest.

Back in the present, Shaw and Colonel Fuller discuss the vehicle unearthed last week. “What we’re looking for was buried in Derry 300 years before the automobile was even invented,” Frank says. Fuller notes the old car was “part of the 1935 cycle, Bradley Gang massacre” where reports told of “sightings of the entity in one of its forms.” (Just say they saw a clown!) Shaw suggests Dick Hallorann might have better luck outlining the monster’s territory if he’s holding “something that put its mark on that thing a long time ago”—the slingshot. This is another moment where the adults know a ton about It, including the nature of its cycles, its shapeshifting properties, and how to hurt it. For IT fans used to the amnesia/blindness affecting Derry’s adults, this is a lot to swallow.

Hallorann and his fellow Black airmen are playing cards and bullshitting about Dick hooking up with Aretha Franklin when the canvas roof collapses on them in the rain. It’s another breadcrumb toward the “upgrade” these men are looking to secure for their leisure time. More pressing matters are afoot for now: Leroy Hanlon and Pauly Russo are tasked with taking Hallorann up in a plane and following his directions like “a human compass.” Dick’s strange, twitchy behavior gives us the episode’s funniest line, from Pauly: “I got a buddy at Fort Bragg who was saying they’re doing, like, mind control on goats or some shit? Is that what this is, is this some goat shit, Lee?!”

The time for lolz comes to an end as a vision takes Hallorann to the sewers, where a door adorned with Pennywise’s name and likeness crashes open. Those chilling yellow eyes peer out, and the monster asks who Hallorann is. Our man with the shine is overcome by images (flashbacks?) of bloody warfare before children’s toys start plopping out of the air into the water. We get our first glimpse of It’s tower of bodies and belongings, all of which float. Hallorann’s grandmother is among them, and she bears a warning: “He’s coming, Dicky. Get out of here—now.”

Out of there means back to the plane, where Dick finds himself trying to jump. Leroy pulls him back, which is good since he’ll be coming over for dinner that night. First, Dick will tell the general that he and his “pals on base” need a place to relax, and—more importantly—that It “wasn’t supposed to see us, it wasn’t supposed to know.” He warns Shaw “something bad’s coming” if they press on.

 At the Hanlon home, Dick prods at Charlotte’s contentment in Maine, or lack thereof. We learn she was a history teacher who’s unable to get anything but clerical work in Derry, and get confirmation she’s played a part in the Civil Rights movement—a pursuit she’s not comfortable leaving behind. Out on the porch, Leroy and Dick talk about the shining (still unnamed) and how it transported Hallorann’s mind from the plane to the sewers. Leroy reveals he’s felt Dick in his head before, when he was part of the gas mask brigade that ambushed Hanlon to test his fear. Leroy orders Dick to stay out of his head in the future.

Rose partakes in a council meeting among the indigenous population, named in IT: Chapter Two as the Shokopiwah, although not here yet. “I don’t know what they think they’re doing out there,” one leader says as they examine images of the Air Force’s digs. “Our ceremonial grounds have always been off limits.” Rose’s nephew Taniel, seen last week monitoring the digs, whispers to her that they “have to do something now, auntie, before they get any closer.” Rose says Taniel and his friends “are not to get involved, not in this—you’re needed.” She doesn’t want the military stopped until their purpose is clear.

Shaw shows up in Rose’s shop and tells her he did experience the particular amnesia that strikes people who face It and leave Derry. He claims the military’s digs in the woods are related to soil surveys and laying pipe to transport water from the Kenduskeag River. He insists she can trust him and asks to see “exactly what areas to stay away from.” We get a flashback to Frank and Rose’s goodbye over five decades ago, where she returned his slingshot as a token to remember their summer. It’s one of two uncanny dissolves morphing her 1908 self into her current self.

In the kids’ thread weaving through the episode and building to a goofy CGI climax, we see Lilly about to leave Juniper Hill, confiding in the head housekeeper, who seems like a lovely and understanding woman. Back at school, Lilly tries to make amends with Ronnie by vowing to use the art of photography to convince the police a monster committed the theater massacre, exonerating Hank. (We briefly see Grogan in jail, where Chief Bowers says a pack of cigarettes and an eyewitness are spelling more trouble for Ronnie’s dad. “You know what they do to kiddie-killers in Shawshank?” Bowers threatens.) The girls recruit Will and Rich, meeting at the standpipe hangout favored by the dearly departed Matty, Phil, and Teds. Rich says the monster’s appearances as Ronnie’s mother and Lilly’s father could make it an evil spirit called an orixá. He suspects this because his uncle was a Santería priest—a babalawo—in Cuba, and could conjure malevolent orixás in the form of dead ancestors by performing a cemetery ceremony.

Somehow these kids’ parents are letting them have “sleepovers” that are lenient enough for them to abscond—amid a strict curfew and a retinue of murdered children—to a graveyard after dark. Once they’ve got a circle of candles, Rich starts effusively repeating a prayer to Santa María. The others glean that he doesn’t exactly know what he’s talking about, and the group’s solidarity crumbles as Ronnie takes off on her bike, followed by the others. 

And here’s where a smorgasbord of very rough CGI takes the fore. Even the initial foggy bike-riding looks bad. Then the gate’s moving, headstones are crumbling, the earth is opening beneath their feet…and the decomposing ghosts of Phil, Suzie, Teddy, and Rich’s uncle (?) are flying at them, cackling and grinning. The cheese factor has been cranked up to 1,000. A left-behind Will, the last person to score the camera in a game of hot potato, tiptoes into a crypt and snaps a pic of—you guessed it, even though we need a few minutes of darkroom development for confirmation—a clown. (The ghosts of Teddy and Suzie were also snapped.) It’s not much of a hammer blow heading into the credits, but Pennywise has officially, if barely, entered the fray in his most famous form. Let the circus begin.

QUESTION CORNER

• What’s Hank Grogan not telling the cops? It sure seems like he’s got a real alibi that he won’t share.
• Last week it really seemed like something was up with all the birth-based terror. On the official podcast from HBO, Andy Muschietti said no larger meaning was intended:

“I think we made sense of it once we had [the scenes]. … Also, there’s a subliminal reason why we probably put them together without knowing. At the end, I can say the horror of childbirth is something that we kind of always come back [to], even without thinking too much about it. It’s also linked to…in the book, none of the Losers have children, right? When they grow up, the part where they’re all adults and they come back, and they realize at one point that, ‘Wait, none of us had children, why?’ And I think it’s related to the idea that bringing kids to this world of horror—and I’m not talking about It anymore, I’m talking about It as a metaphor of how fucked up this world is, and bringing a child to this world is a matter of concern. Childbirth in itself is like, you know, a catastrophic spectacle where there’s blood and guts and fluids of all kinds.”

STEPHEN KING TRIVIA

• In IT: Chapter Two, Henry Bowers has been institutionalized at Juniper Hill since the events of the first film. We see a bunch of his art on the walls, and one figure—drawn repeatedly—looks remarkably like the one-eyed old man who haunts young Frank in this episode:

• Actor Joshua Odjick (Taniel) had a memorable role in September’s excellent Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk, where he played Collie Parker.
• In the cemetery, we see a Jesus sculpture come to life and give a Pennywise grin. In the novel, when Bev has her spooky visit with Mrs. Kersh and things start to go nightmarish, a picture of Jesus on the wall “stuck out his tongue.”

Zach Dionne is a Mainer writing in Tennessee; he makes Stephen King things on Patreon.